Sunday, March 29, 2015

If you're a web developer, you may have found out that any website can be added to the home screen of any iOS devices.

It's a feature that is builtin iOS and with the proper meta-tags in your HTML code, you can create a webapp for iPhones and iPads quite easily.

The main issue is when your webpage has links. The default behaviour in iOS is to open Safari to view the link, meaning that your webapp will open in Safari as soon as the user clicks a link in your webpage. This is annoying as you may want the link to open inside the webapp and not in Safari.

Do not despair, there is a simply trick that you can use with Javascript to avoid this issue. Nothing fancy and nothing complicated. Just a simple line of Javascript will solve this problem...

Here's a common link in a webpage:

<a href="viewer.php">View this link</a>

The problem is that as the user will click this link on his iPhone, Safari will popup to display the content of the link instead displaying the "viewer.php" from inside the webapp. Instead, create your links as such:

<div onclick="document.location='viewer.php';">View this link</div>

This will load the new webpage and stay inside the webapp instead of opening in Safari. As a bonus, the "onclick" event is available on almost all elements, meaning that you can transform any element into a clickable link.

The, you just have to use CSS to set the proper look on the element to it looks like it is a link and behaves like a link...

Sunday, March 15, 2015

One of the greatest place to publish videos is YouTube. You work hard at creating quality content, upload your videos files and then hope for the best.

Actually, you will then share over the social networks about your channel, subscribe to other channels in the hope that someone else will also subscribe to your content. If your starting your channel, there is a good chance that it will take time before getting more than a 100 views on your latest video.

Even if your videos are of great quality and that you promote your show everywhere, you are fighting against the masters of YouTube. Thousands of Youtubers are uploading videos each day. Only a few will be noticed as everybody is hunting for the most popular channels.

That's why I've created Crombz.com. I wanted to create a community of Youtubers and vloggers, dedicated at promoting new channels and less known Youtubers. The mission of the community is to find out the best and give them exposure.

Don't worry, it's free! There is no scam or points to earn. You just need to submit your video (YouTube link) and that's it. To avoid spamming, a few filters have been put in place:

- Video duration must be at least 2 minutes- View count must be less than 500 when submitting- Videos are filtered to avoid porn, illegal stuff or copyrighted material- When submitting, you need to wait 60 seconds to avoid spamming

Crombz is new but already getting many fans after 3 weeks. I am trying to build a community where you can discover the undiscovered.

Randomly, submitted videos are shared over Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Sharing buttons for major social networks are available for each videos to help promote the selected content.

More features will be added as the community will grow. Already, a Trending page has been setup to find out which submitted videos have gain the most views in their first 24 hours (from everywhere, not only from Crombz).

Help is needed to build a great community:

- Dedicated Youtubers that want to create great content- More visibility is needed for Crombz.com. Please share with your friends.- Donation are accepted for promotion with Adwords- Ideas are welcome to improve Crombz. Keep in mind that this is a community, not a spamming site.

As Crombz.com will grow with dedicated Youtubers, automatic feed will be reduced to leave room to the community.

In the first week, Crombz was having around 10-30 visitors a day. On the second week, the number of visitors was around 150-200 and climbing. As writing this post, that number has grown over a 1000 daily.

Yesterday, March 14th 2015, was spectacular as we had reached 2500 visitors at then end of the day. Things got slower today with only 1000 visitors but still happy about the result.

Crombz is getting more traffic each day but needs dedicated Youtubers. Help me out finding them, talk about Crombz, blog about it, tweet about it...